During the violent decade of the Mexican Revolution the national political sphere expanded to incorporate the Mexican periphery and its implicit class and ethnic character. As the poor and indigenous people of Mexico's rural periphery found a place in the domain of the political, class and ethnicity gained an explicit role in Mexican politics. The case of Juchitán demonstrates this shift. Specifically, in the name of their poor and indigenous followers, political and cultural mediators in Juchitán used marginalizing discourses of intense parochialism and excessive violence to justify alternative political claims, to demonstrate their potential as politically-sentient beings, and to assert their entitlement to political representation, based on service to the nation. The state responded to these claims with either repression or accommodation, depending on the political expediency of either strategy. Ultimately, the breakup of the Mexican state's monopoly of repressive force resulted in a scramble among the dominant classes to construct popular constituencies, and this competition produced a more inclusive hegemonic political order. While not wholly emancipatory, the political culture that emerged from the ashes of revolutionary violence represented a significant departure from that of the Old Regime.

This dissertation serves as a corrective to analyses of the political behavior of so-called "Deep Mexico" that have represented the inhabitants of Mexico's periphery as ethnically and socioeconomically unified, and either vertically-oriented or defensive, politically. I argue that these interpretations not only ignore a long history of internal distinction in Juchitán, but by giving rise to a class of cultural mediators with access to the national political sphere, the process of internal distinction not only enabled the people of Juchitán to participate in the revolution, but shaped their very participation, and empowered them to negotiate the terms of their own incorporation into the postrevolutionary state. Juchitán was wracked with conflict based on internal distinction, and participation in the revolution not only did not conform to an inside-outside dichotomy, but was actually experienced and articulated as a primarily internal conflict between rival socioeconomic and ethnic factions. It was in competition between rival factions that the terms of Juchitán's postrevolutionary incorporation were forged.